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WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS Earthdate September 1999 |
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WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS Earthdate September 1999 |
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OFFICIAL
NEWS |
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After hackers affected the Internet in August, the problem in September was hurricane Floyd which wreaked havoc on cyberspace, causing Internet problems all up and down the east coast. The Federation Chronicle had a make-over and appeared on the web site with a new format, and after a few week's of experimenting, with a new and simpler masthead. Otherwise, it was a quiet month in Fed.
SOL EXPOSE: GREAT MISSPELLINGS OF THE GALAXY Alan Lenton can't spell. Sorry to be blunt, but it's true. Over the years since the creation of Fed, well-meaning people such as myself have tried hard to tell him about the various spelling errors in Fed and get him to fix them. And mostly, we've succeeded. It hasn't been easy, though! This week's Sol Expose is about some of the spelling errors in Fed, past and present. And since it's a big subject, we'll continue next week with a wrongly-named alien. For the first year of Fed, players who had not yet bought clothes gloried in the following description:
Those of you who suffer from the same affliction as Alan, and who cannot spot errors in things, will probably look at that and say, "So?" But people like me, who are ace spellers and what's more can't help but notice mistakes in anything written by other people, will be aware that the word "height" was misspelled as "hight". Quite an easy mistake to make, you might think. But what is remarkable about this is that it took over a year of whingeing from players to convice Our Illustrious Leader that this was a mistake, and to fix it. Something that is not a mistake, but people frequently report as one, is the description of the hobo on Earth:
That word "bindle" is not a common word and lots of people think it's a typo, and should be "bundle". Actually, a bindle is a bundle containing the belongings of a hobo, or a tramp. And although it doesn't appear in the dictionary I just checked, my spell-checker recognizes it as correct... so if Microsoft says it exists, it must do! Incidentally, a bindlestiff is a rogue tramp who goes around stealing other tramps' bindles. Finally for this week, the biggest, grandest, most obvious mistake in all of Fed, something that you can't avoid seeing as you fly around the Solar System. I'm talking about one of the possible destinations - that moon orbiting Jupiter called Callisto. Or in Fed, Castillo. The moon was named after a nymph, in Greek mythology, who was changed into a she-bear by Zeus. Those gods, they just loved their practical jokes! Quite how Bella came to make such a fundamental error, I don't know. The trouble was that the names of the planets in Fed proliferate throughout the code so much that by the time anyone pointed out the error, it was too late to change it. So we are stuck with a moon that's a mistake. (Interestingly enough, Microsoft don't like either spelling - the best they can offer is Chalets.) Now I'd better proof-read this article very, very carefully... I would look very foolish jeering at Alan's spelling while making a misteak myself!
I really did throw down a gauntlet in last week's Federation Chronicle. Writing an article about spelling mistakes really was asking for trouble, and despite my care at proof-reading my work, there were a few mistakes - which sharp-eyed readers took great delight in pointing out to me. However, I can only stick my tongue out and go "Nyah nyah nyah nyah" to those of you who told me that I had spelt the word whining wrong. Nope. Whingeing is what I wrote, and that's what I meant to write. It is a British word; to quote my dictionary:
Whingeing is a word that has been used in Federation since the start of the Universe. So there!
This week we continue the discussion of the Galaxy's famous spelling mistakes by looking at the strange alien being on Titan, the Tinguey:
Long, long ago, I asked Bella about the origin of the odd creature, and he told me it was named after a famous artist who specialized in kinetic sculptures and mobiles. So when I embarked on this series of Sol Exposes, I was confident that I would be able to find information on the person behind the alien. Imagine my surprise, then, when typing the word "tinguey" into several different search engines yielded absolutely no hits at all. I got back to Bella and complained about this. "Oh," he told me, "I probably spelt the word wrong." Rolling my eyes, I asked what the correct spelling was. The reply was just a vague shrug. So I resigned myself to not being able to include the tinguey in this series. A few weeks later, Bella contacted me in excitement. "I've found out what the tinguey ought to have been," he said. "The artist's name is Tinguely." So I was able to write about the Tinguey's origins, but instead of including it in with other aliens, I have grouped it with the other misspellings. So, then, Jean Tinguely (1925-1991) was a Swiss sculptor and experimental artist, noted for his machinelike kinetic sculptures that destroyed themselves in the course of their operation. His most sophisticated creations, he called metamechanicals. These were robotlike contraptions constructed of wire and sheet metal, the constituent parts of which moved or spun at varying speeds. He also produced Painting Machines, robotlike machines which continuously painted pictures of abstract patterns to the accompaniment of sounds and noxious odors. In 1960 he created a sensation with his first large self-destroying sculpture, the 27-foot-high metamatic entitled Homage to New York. Its public suicide was to be demonstrated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but the event was a fiasco. The complex machine failed to destroy itself as planned, caught fire, and had to be dispatched by city firemen. However, his next two self-destroying machines, entitled Study for an End of the World, performed more successfully, detonating themselves with considerable amounts of explosives. There is a museum dedicated to Jean Tinguely in his birthplce of Basel, Switzerland. The museum has a web site which includes pictures of some of his work, at http://www.tinguely.ch/default.engl.html.
SOL EXPOSE: THE CASTILLO CLIFFS There's not much on Castillo. A small moon containing a research station, is all. But it does have some interesting scenery:
What's interesting about that, you may ask? Well, nothing, but until recently these cliffs had another name: the Krzynski cliffs (note: this is probably not the correct spelling, but my spell checker is being no help at all!). Those who played Fed in the early days on AOL, or before that, may remember the name. The reason they were called that goes way, way back into the mists of time, to the dawn of Federation and even before. When Alan decided he wanted to write a multi-player game, he envisaged that he would design the game and somebody else would do the programming. At that time, Alan's only programming experience was in BASIC. So he teamed up with somebody who worked for Compunet in tech support, whose name was so unpronounceable that he was known simply as JohnK. The cliffs were named after him. After a few months, however, it became obvious that this arrangement wasn't going to work. Alan discovered that JohnK planned to write Fed in BASIC - and from his own experience he knew that it just wouldn't be possible because the language wasn't up to it. Besides, the Compunet computer, a DEC-10, didn't support BASIC - only FORTRAN IV. Then the boss of Compunet discovered that JohnK was running a free bulletin board system on the Compunet computers, so he left under a cloud and that was the end of his participation in Fed - or his non-participation! But he was immortalized, for a time at least, in those desolate cliffs on Castillo. Alan got the Compunet programmer to teach him FORTRAN and soon had the first part of the program running on the DEC-10, but really all you could do was walk around. It was clear that it just wasn't going to work, so the project was put on hold for 6 months. Then Compunet got its own kit, a so-called "super computer", a box with a Motorola 68020 chip, about the equivalent of an Amiga or an Atari ST. It had the most enormous hard drives... 4 at 60 meg each which cost a fortune. Meanwhile, Alan had got himself an ST, and when he discovered that the 68020's operating system could be run on the ST, he revived the project. He taught himself to program in C, and the rest, as they say, is history.
THE DEMI-GODDESS MAKES A MISTAKE It isn't easy being a demi-goddess, you know. Gods and goddesses are, by definition, perfect; but being only half-perfect means, as you can imagine, that only fifty percent of the things I do actually turn out right. You should see the heap of discarded work in the corner of my office. Sometimes, the imperfect does slip through, rather than being weeded out at the editing stage. The result is that total rubbish finds its way into the Federation Chronicle. Such is what happened last week, when I cheerfully told you that the sheer cliffs on Castillo used to be called the Krzesinski cliffs. Utter nonsense, as Almandot (the smart alec) pointed out to me. The Krzesinski cliffs have never been on Castillo. They are, in fact, on Titan and are still there:
Everything else I said about the significance of the name Krzesinski is true, though. Honest!
Those of you who have explored the Solar System planets thoroughly and found all of the objects which careless people have dropped here and there, will no doubt have come across the flower in the Church on the moon:
But you may not realize that the flower has an unusual property. It is edible. Along with the sandwich, the biscuit, the sugar lump and the rolypoly, the flower is a source of nutrition and energy. Why? The reason goes back to the early days of Fed, when one of the most influential players was a homicidal winged horse called Pegasus. Yes, the same Pegasus that now terrorizes Sol space as a mobile used to terrorize Sol space as a player. Pegasus reasoned that horses can eat flowers - everyone knows that. He was a horse. Therefore he. And eventually, Our Illustrious Leader Bella got fed up with him moaning on about it, and for the sake of a quiet life gave in. The flower got its edible flag. So now if you find yourself a little peckish when on the moon, you can nip into the church and nosh on the flower.
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